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Someone will quickly discover the realities of hosting a public video downloader on non-dedicated hardware for the internet.
Lawd have mercy if he doesn't caches.
Who doesn’t like Cache eviction
All my homies love LRU
Dude, love that RCR avatar.
Haha, I love RCR
is that alex from river city? hahahha
yeah, haha
Is OP not just hosting JS to do it client-side? That would make it no heavier than any other webpage.
No. POST request to the server, responds with the video payload.
Ouch. AWS bill this month is gonna be brutal.
ELi5?
They're saying OP could've used JavaScript (JS) to write a program so that the user's computer does all the downloading on its own. This would've made it so the server (whatever OP is running this website on) only deals with the normal load, in terms of computing and bandwidth, any other website would deal with. Instead, users are sending messages to the server, requesting the server send the user the videos. Meaning the server has to deal with the normal load of a website, the added load of the messages, and the massive load of retrieving and sending those large video files to the user.
Meaning that your browsers sends a request to the server (in this case the yt2file.com server), and the server responds with the requested data (in this case, the video file).
Compare that to what the other commenter was suggesting, where the yt2file.com website just hosts a basic webpage with some javascript (code that runs in the browser), and that javascript code requests the data from youtube directly, meaning that the yt2file.com server is not involved in any way other than serving that initial webpage.
There's pros and cons to both.
Letting the server handle it means you necessarily share the video you want to download with that server, which maybe you don't want to do (but realistically... most people aren't going to care). On the down side for the server owner, it also means that their server has to first download the video from youtube, potentially transcode it, and then effectively forward it back to you, meaning they incur bandwidth costs twice and potentially processing costs as well.
Letting pure javascript handle it in the browser avoids those, but is typically limited to the exact formats made available by youtube, so no transcoding for compatibility and the like.
For an example of the latter that can be used as a bookmarklet (desktop browsers; technically works on mobile as well but mobile browsers don't offer the convenience factors of bookmarklets so much): https://ethanaobrien.github.io/youtube-downloader/index.html
Damn, that's hardcore.
Comment deleted by user
Oh. Yeah, unless OP has found a way to redirect requests to a hidden YouTube endpoint that serves MP4 instead of TLS, they're about to get a nasty bill from their hosting provider.
Comment deleted by user
Its free. He might be clueless or he could be testing the server. Harvesting meta data of users.
Would you explain what issues you forsee?
Legal, bandwidth, scaling ($$$), privacy, rate limiting automation...
Looks like that someone has discovered exactly what you predicted.
503 error now...
We did it reddit!
SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
Just came back to this thread because the website is already dead
…still down
Were you surprised that the domain yt2file was available? That's actually pretty clean and easy to remember.
I know right? 😄 I was really suprised.
The fact even with YT Premium you have to be online at least every 30 days to keep what you downloaded is stupid. I guess that’s how they force you to subscribe to the service.
Ignore everything below. Just use NewPipe. Open source. Free. No ads. Background playback. Download files. Everything you want. You're welcome in advance.
no accounts support, no way to sync your subscriptions between devices
I've always wondered if I was using it wrong. I can understand the appeal of newpipe if you're looking for a specific video, but if you jusy want to go through what your subs have uploaded then it doesn't really work
if that's your only device it can import your subscriptions and then store them locally, but also that may trigger rate limiting when polling multiple channels to find new videos, the app that Louis Rossman promoted ended up doing that early on, no idea how that behaves today
Huh? You can import your subscriptions from actual YouTube.
Revanced
I mean, it can't fix all the issues but it is helpful
I still despise the terrible interface google made but it at least hides some of the nonsense and reliably sets the default quality... unless yt decides to just not serve anything above 480p at all for some videos but app probably can't fix that
ReVanced still requires you to use NewPipe to download the videos though.
This is the way.
Sent from Revanced RIF is Fun App because Reddit app is wank.
I use an app called Seal to download videos, and it's been a game-changer. I have yet to feed it a video link that it didn't download. Only thing I wish it had was interoperability with Revanced
I can send videos straight to seal with the share button in revanced, not having to leave the app is pretty nifty. It gives you an options overlay popup with a download button and you're back to YouTube. But this may be dependent on your version of Android, not sure.
Can it download a playlist though? I have yet to find one that can. Mostly have to feed individual links. Quite a tedious job when you want to download e.g. a fragmented audiobook or a soundtrack of over 150 songs
Can't use it on all devices. Prefer premium.
Have you tried Greyjay?
I subscribe to it because I don't want ads, downloading is a bonus.
I use ReVanced cause I'm poor and have zero interest in giving YouTube a penny under any circumstances.
I get that you're poor but YouTube is a massive undertaking. There is literally no one else except Google that can build something like this and keep it running and if it's not profitable they will shut it down or increase the ads. I must say my experience with YouTube premium is so much better. Almost all my complaints have disappeared. Revanced is fine and I used it for some time but premium just works plus I get YouTube music so no Spotify subscription needed.
Sorry but no, google bought youtube.
History of YouTube
I can understand not liking YouTube company-wise but I like to support the creators I like.
Donate to them directly
That's fair! I prefer to do that separately from the YouTube platform when I'm able. Usually they have a patreon or something. Most of my favorites are on nebula and if I was ever able to afford that I'd feel a lot better about it than through YouTube.
That's what Patreon is for.
you are supporting YouTube dude, not the creators.
It also lets you listening to stuff while having the app minimised too, that was my reason for subbing
I enjoy that functionality very much but do not think it should be behind the paywall.
Or if you navigate to YT in a Firefox browser you can have background playback.
I just use revanced.
Revanced + ublock origin + sponsorblock
NewPipe on Android, Invidious on PC and iPhone
I subscribe for the YouTube music. I actually had Google music premium before they turned into ytmusic.
The ad free is a huge bonus, other little things like 2x play when you hold your finger on the screen, background play, downloads.
Next I hear they're trying out an "smart skip" that'll skip the sponsored content in video. Which would be a HUGE bonus. I get that creators use sponsorship spots to increase revenue, but to me, it's still an ad and YouTube premium is supposed to be ad-free.
YTP in a family plan is the best money can buy. I use YT 3 hours a day minumum, totally worth it
For more than one account for sure but I just use me
Doesn't yt-dlp already do this?
Yes but yt-dlp is not as easy to use for most people.
That's why the gui version, Open Video Downloader, exists
I didn't know about that. Will try next time, thank you.
Just be sure to use the fork that's still maintained. The original one is pretty annoying without some manual tinkering.
https://github.com/StefanLobbenmeier/youtube-dl-gui/releases
There’s also Stacher.io
If you can’t type yt-dlp and paste the url you most likely shouldn’t be on the internet
yt-dlp is difficult to use?
Is a webpage where you just paste the link easier to use than a console application without its own interface, where you have to read the documentation to figure stuff out? Is that seriously what you are asking me or am I missing something?
$ yt-dlp <link>
Wow, such difficult
For me? No. For my mum? Yes.
I need a web version of yt-dlp so you just paste the link in, it gives you a choice of formats and you click the one you want to download it
this is great, but cobalt is still a thing, no ads, no trackers, data only decryptable from the downloaded link is stored for 90 seconds then purged, viewable and self-hostable code if you're a nerd... don't want to be the guy that complains about two cakes but this seems a bit redundant and a bit more restricted. still, thank you! :D
main cobalt instance is also very reliable and has been up for several years :)
damn! didn't know about this, thanks a lot man!
Can you create an extension to make it more easily accessible on a browser ?
Extensions are not my expertise but I'll definitely do it in the future. Thank you for your feedback.
If you want I can help a bit on extensions.
Honestly this is what I would love. I already use a version of the downloader with a GUI, but if I could just right click on the page to download that would save me a bunch of time. I put a lot of what I watch into Plex because YouTube's recommendations and watch tracking suck.
Hydrous Extension (basically a self hosted booru image gallery, highly recommended if you save a lot of images or videos be it memes or smut) has an extension that lets me do this so I can literally just right click an image I want to save and send it to my database and have it reverse search for a higher quality or immediately add tags (it will add tags on it's own as a regular task overnight anyway).
Jdownloader exists
People forget about jdownloader